Category: Social Media

Facebook is set to get its share of Royalty with the Queen of England set to create here own Facebook fan page. Starting this Monday, fans of the Queen of England will be able to view royalty pictures, videos, news and speeches on Facebook.

Facebook though is not new to this kind of attention with US President Barack Obama already having his own fan page on the social networking site. With the Queen of England joining in, they definitely have a lot of royalty amongst them. Not to forget the huge brands and celebrities which have already been a part of Facebook for long.

Facebook and scams go hand in hand. No matter what you do, you are never safe from one. A new fake Like scam has erupted on Facebook, and though it is not nasty, it shows how scammers can pawn Facebook users and make them like links without their consent.

Take for example this new scam with an enticing link and a video titled "0MG! This GUY must be St0ned to Death for doing this to a GIRL!". Just for the record, there is no video and this link is just a scam which disguises a Facebook like button as a different button. As you can see above, 3 of my friends liked this link. If you visit the site in question, you will see an interface as seen in the image below.

The site uses an interface similar to Facebook and also sports false copyrights. In case you thought that was bad, your entire intention of clicking on that link was to watch the video. However, there is no sign of any video at all. The "Continue" button in this page is actually a "Fake Facebook Like button", which has been manipulated using some styling. Clicking on it will stealthily like the website and take you back to your profile.

Once again, some scams are easy to fall prey to. Though they are not 100% avoidable, the best you can do is to visit your Facebook profile page after you have clicked on a link if you find it dicey. If you find any unwanted updates or likes, delete them immediately. In my case, my test account showed that I liked the website after I clicked on the button (see screenshot above).

For the record about 221, 572 people have felt to the scam while I wrote this post. Don’t be one of them. Also help your friends by liking this website instead .

Ever wanted to say something which you could not fit in 140 characters on Twitter? Well, there are tons of services which allow you to tweet more than 140 characters. However, those services will basically trim your tweet to a smaller length and then add a URL for users to see the rest of the tweet.

Tall Tweets, is a similar service, which allows you to send tweets which are longer than 140 characters. However, instead of adding a link to view the whole tweet, this service trims the content and fits it in multiple tweets.

You can try out tall tweets and send out longer tweets from within the browser to see how it works, or visit the developer’s detailed post to know more.

Have you ever been curious on what conversation two people have in private life? Well, you for definitely cannot know that, but starting today you will know what they have been talking about in public, which events they have been attending, which photos they are in together and so on, albeit only if they are on Facebook.

Facebook launched a new feature today called Friendship Pages, which basically contain public wall posts and comments between two friends, photos in which they were tagged in together, events they RSVP’d to and more.

Only users who are friends of both the people will be able to view the historical data and exchanges between two users. That is, you’ll be able to see a friendship page if you are friends with one of the people and have permission to view both people’s profiles.

You will find a friendship page from links under relevant Wall posts, under relationship stories and under the main photo on a friend’s profile page, though I don’t see any yet.

Now here’s the catch. On a day to day basis you might see several people commenting on each other’s post and being tagged in a photo. However, no one really cares about the historical data and won’t browse hundreds of pages to figure out what you have been discussing and doing. With Facebook’s Friendship pages, all this historical data will be available in one page.

Of course since this data is public you might argue that it is possibly right for Facebook to display it however they want to. Right? A simple option like "Don’t allow me to be paired in Friendship pages" should do the job.

I love the concept of Facebook fan pages since they allow brands, websites and people to connect with their fans through one of the biggest social networking website in the world. However, managing a fan page is a nightmare specially when you allow anyone to post to your wall.

In my experience of managing the Techie Buzz Fan Page (psst – we have 3000 fans, become one if you aren’t already). I have seen a lot of posts which are spam and have been manually removing them by deleting them from the wall. This process is tedious because of the amount of posts I have to delete.

But it looks like Facebook has finally begun to understand the problems fan page admins are facing with the introduction of a new Spam Filter for Pages. According to the FAQ about Spam filter, Facebook says:

Facebook is now helping Page admins ensure that the most valuable content posted by users on their Page wall is more visible to anyone viewing the Page. We are now offering automatic content filtering on Page walls that will ensure that posts soliciting spam are removed from public view as well as ensure that posts containing good content remain more visible.

So go ahead and check your fan page, maybe you would see much lesser spam now and will be able to manage it with ease.

Facebook has almost made a habit of getting into controversies surrounding its privacy and security policies. The stinging criticism from a wide section of the press, following the launch of Open Graph at f8, has clearly had an effect on Facebook. The beleaguered social networking giant has been busy cleaning up its act over the past few months.

Now, Facebook has added a couple of more features to enhance security. The first of them is Remote Logout, which Facebook has been testing for some time. As suggested by its name, this feature allows you to remotely log out of Facebook in other systems that you might have used in the past. It can be a lifesaver in case you forget to log out while surfing on a public terminal, and has long been a feature of Gmail. You can access this from Account –>Account Settings–>Settings–>Account Security.

The other new feature is One-time Password. If you have registered your mobile phone with Facebook, you can text otpto 32665 (FBOOK) to receive a temporary password that can be used to log into Facebook. This password can only be used once and stays valid for twenty minutes. This feature is once again intended for use on unsecured public terminals, which might house keyloggers and malwares.

Both of these features are welcome additions. Unfortunately, like many other Facebook initiatives, their availability isn’t immediately noticeable to users. For example, in Facebook, the remote logout option is buried deep within the settings panel, whereas Gmail presents it in the footer of every page.

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Two things that go hand in hand in the social media is Facebook and Privacy. The social networking giant has had a lot of privacy problems, and they continue to have the same problems almost everyday.

A new report by WSJ says that several Facebook applications transmit personal IDs outside Facebook, thus giving access to your name and in some cases your friends names to advertising and internet tracking companies.

However, Facebook has undermined the usefulness of the Facebook UIDs in a new blog post:

Press reports have exaggerated the implications of sharing a UID. Knowledge of a UID does not enable anyone to access private user information without explicit user consent. Nevertheless, we are committed to ensuring that even the inadvertent passing of UIDs is prevented and all applications are in compliance with our policy.

However, another report on a WSJ blog says that a lawsuit has been filed in a California court for breaching a contract with users when it sent data to advertisers which could be used to identify users without their knowledge.

Earlier this month, the Facebook app for iPhone also had a privacy problem where your friends contact numbers were leaked due to a bug in the software. So, how safe is your Facebook data? Well, Facebook data is only as safe as your privacy settings are and those are a bit complicated for a layman to take advantage of. However, there are tools like Reclaim Privacy which allows you to assess your privacy settings and make changes if required.

Klout is a service which tells you what your social worthiness on Twitter is. They have now extended their Klout to well Facebook. The new Klout for Facebook feature will tell you about your influence on the most popular social networking site in the world.

Klout announced today that they will now be able to display users their Facebook influence based on how your conversations and content generate interests among your friends.

Over the past few months we’ve been working hard analyzing Facebook accounts to understand the nature of influence on the world’s largest social network. As on Twitter, our underlying premise for influence is not the number of friends or followers you have, but your ability to drive action.

So is your social media influence on Facebook good enough? Go ahead to Klout.com and connect it to your Facebook data to learn and understand more about it.

Please note that it will take around 72 hours for a report to be generated about your Facebook Klout.

Twitter has finally rolled out the #newtwitter interface to all its users. In a blog post title #100%, Twitter has said that they have now rolled out the interface to all of their 160 million users.

The new Twitter is a lot like theiriPad client and provides a richer experience for users with inline photos and videos from sites like Flickr, YouTube, UStream and Yfrog, sadly there is no integration for images from TwitPic yet.

Twitter is also asking users to check out the whacky Twitter video created by Will.I.Am about the #newtwitter. You can watch this one below (note: video is mildly NSFW, so turn your speakers low or use a headphone)

However, the director of the movie has not fully created the movie out of facts. So how would the Social Network movie pan out if it were based on facts? No better director than Mark Zuckerberg right? Well if you said yes, here is a funny take on what the Social Network movie would actually pan out if Mark Zuckerberg himself directed it courtesy Business Insider.

So what do you think? Was this better than the original Social Network movie?